


Even Unto Darkness

by efnisien



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Alternate Universe, Incest, M/M, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-10
Updated: 2010-01-10
Packaged: 2017-10-06 02:14:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/efnisien/pseuds/efnisien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angel loses his soul and it stays lost; Wesley breaks from the others to follow Angelus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Even Unto Darkness

_Gall pechod mawr ddyfod trwy ddrws bychan._  
A great sin can enter through a small door.--Welsh proverb

Although the others believed differently, Wesley knew precisely the moment when he chose to follow Angelus. He dreamt of it every day--he had adopted the demon's hours, to the extent that hours could be said to exist in a sunless city--and he woke without fail after Cordelia's mocking laughter as she shattered the orb that contained Angel's soul. The sound of shattering glass was like music, pale and terrible. It had become inextricably entwined in his mind with the snapping of broken fingers, the smashing of bone against concrete or metal--things Angelus had declined to commit against him, things Wesley had committed against others for Angelus's sake.

"Rise and shine," Angelus said languorously, sliding his hand along Wesley's neck only to stop short of the pulse. His fingertips were cool and slightly rough. "Would you like to know what I've brought you for breakfast?"

"I'm not your pet," Wesley retorted. Once he would have attempted to maintain a Watcher's detachment, the discipline that theoretically would allow you to outwit evil so old that its native language had no words for time. They all knew how well that had worked out. He snapped at Angelus because it let him pretend that his words made a difference. Illusions died hard.

Strange, how living with Angelus clarified why he followed Angel, even unto darkness.

Angelus chose to be amused rather than annoyed. After all, Wesley was no threat to him, here in this city of shadows. With Cordelia's help, Angelus had already destroyed the thing that mattered most to Wesley: Angel himself.

Angelus had a curious domestic streak. Or perhaps not so curious: domestic, _domus_; and even Angel had been obsessive, not to mention possessive, about his territory, his people, his family. His cooking was exemplary. Wesley had not, at first, desired to know why Angelus considered the skill worthy of practice. Being what he was, Angelus had told him anyway.

"Food makes you remember things," Angelus had said as he poured tea for them both--darjeeling, brewed to perfection--then spread Devon cream over fresh-baked scones. No currants; he hadn't been able to obtain them, given the circumstances. The scones were delicious anyway. "Food takes you back to your family, the people who ought to feed you and take care of you." He sipped from his own cup, a tiny pale thing in his hand. "It gets at a whole lot of reactions without you ever pausing to think about it."

"As you're doing to me," Wesley said softly, thinking of dressing for breakfast and trying to minimize the number of crumbs that fell to his plate whenever he bit into his buttered toast. His father's pointed courtesy and his mother's downcast eyes.

Today, breakfast was other: plain toast with a stick of butter set out for him, fried eggs (Angelus preferred his sunny-side up, although he didn't inflict this on Wesley) in the selfsame butter, orange juice. Plain, chipped plates and mismatched silverware. Angelus had plenty of matching silverware; not using it meant he was making a statement. Or possibly just savoring the last invisible flecks of blood on a butter knife he had filched from his latest victim.

Wesley made a point of sipping the orange juice, which must have been fresh-squeezed; knife to butter, butter to toast, the crunch of teeth against the crust. Neatly he divided his eggs into quarters, then eights; ate one of the pieces. "This is what you served when I first came to join you," he said when he had swallowed.

The brilliance of Angelus's smile still had the power to make Wesley ache inside, caught somewhere between pain and wonder.

"You haven't eaten yet," Wesley observed. Sometimes Angelus liked to feed at the same time. Wesley had the scars to prove it, silvery parallel marks down both sides of his neck. He had the memories of Angelus's victims, brought upstairs one at a time, the blood on Angelus's mouth and fingers afterwards. The blood never splattered onto Wesley's own meals. Angelus could feed neatly when he cared to.

"I'm not hungry yet," Angelus said. He was lying. The hunger announced itself in his avid eyes, the way he tilted his head to listen to the underbeat of Wesley's quickening pulse.

Then again, sometimes hunger wasn't physical.

Angelus paced back and forth, back and forth, his movements graceful in a way Angel's never had been. Angel had always walked as though the weight of damnation were a physical thing. The demon, on the other hand, did not find anything unnatural in the searing touch of sunlight or cross or holy water, did not find anything unnatural in strength and speed beyond human limits. The demon was at home in the body it wore.

Just as Wesley started chewing the last piece of toast, Angelus said casually, "They're coming up the wall."

"They," without antecedent, could only refer to--Wesley swallowed the hard lump in his mouth and got up so suddenly he almost knocked the chair over. "We have to get you out of here."

Not himself, but Angelus, even though the vampire was more than capable of taking care of himself. It helped not to be fettered by conscience or compassion. And even though the others would not hesitate to take Wesley apart by slow inches on account of his turning coat.

Angelus laughed, not unkindly, not kindly either. "I'm not the one in danger."

"You never think you are," Wesley murmured. But he was really talking to a dead man, an absent ghost.

The two of them took up position just out of sight of the balcony. Angelus had himself as a weapon; Wesley had a small crossbow with steel bolts. Rather than trusting his own ears, Wesley watched Angelus's face, with its deceptively quizzical expression. Soon enough he, too, heard the faint sounds of people ascending the stairs.

The first exchange went by so quickly that Wesley's eyes registered only a blur and the sound of fists against flesh and muffled curses, the unmistakable sound of bone breaking. "Connor!" Angelus said with unalloyed delight. "Good to know that my son still thinks of me."

Connor's legs didn't look like they were in good shape. Glaring up at his father, he said, "It doesn't matter if you take me down. The others will get you."

"Bored already," Angelus said to no one in particular. "Don't they teach elocution anymore?"

Wesley kept silent; didn't offer to shoot Connor, though he would have done it unquestioningly if Angelus had required it of him. He had learned the hard way what came of trusting his own judgment. The entire situation--the City of Angels losing the sun, Angel himself losing his soul--stemmed from Wesley's not to trust Angel with the prophecy.

Besides, as Wesley had learned from studying Angelus's history, and from personal experience, Angelus liked to torment his possessions, and didn't appreciate interference.

Connor didn't even look at Wesley. Small surprise; he was no vampire and he could almost taste the boy's contempt. _Think what you will,_ Wesley said to himself. _At least I am no patricide._

Angelus hauled Connor up, doing so slowly enough that Wesley could follow the motion, and threw him across the room. Wesley blanked the noises from his mind. Only vibrations in the air, he told himself. He was not listening to the cracking of bone, nor to a boy's ragged breathing. He was not listening to anything but his heartbeat, for all that his heart had become a silent thing, pitted through with shadows.

"Keep an eye on him," Angelus said, nodding at Connor, "and don't shoot too many holes in him unless you have to."

Wesley laughed painfully. The only reason he had a chance against Connor was that Angelus had broken him too badly to get back up. And even that was chancy. Angelus didn't stay to hear the end of that laugh, but vaulted headlong down the stairs to meet the others. Wesley peered over the balcony's rusting edge, cold wind stinging his eyes: there was Gunn with his truck, and several more besides; Gunn's ability to rally troops was something they should have made more use of, in the old days. Lorne's shattering voice.

He didn't look for Cordelia, because dead was dead, and most especially he didn't look for--

Wesley told himself he didn't need to risk tetanus, and slipped back into the living room. Connor's usual sullenness was replacing by the fever-brightness of agony. Once Wesley would have felt a compulsion to explain himself. Instead, he distracted himself by taking inventory of Connor's visible injuries. Connor was doing his best to set one of the snapped bones by himself. Since Angelus had given him no indication that he was to help, Wesley only watched, rearranging everything he saw into an abstract collection of shapes and masses and shadows.

"You could make a difference, you know," Connor said in a low, angry voice. "I don't know how you did it, but he trusts you. You could ambush him--"

"Angelus trusts no one," Wesley said, aware that the demon could probably hear them. Besides, it was true. The trust Angelus had for him was the trust that a man has for a chained dog.

Instead of pressing the argument, Connor returned his attention to his wounds. He had learned something of judgment, then. Wesley didn't know why it hurt him that Connor didn't try harder, when they both knew they were committed to their separate courses.

"Wesley--"

The voice was one he had hoped never to hear again, a soft drawl. No fear, though. He was traitorously glad of it. He squared his shoulders and looked at Fred, who was unbruised, unburned, unbroken. Even her eyes held no reproach in them. It made him wonder what Angelus had done to her.

"Wesley, look at me. _Look_ at me." Beneath that drawl was steel. "It's not your fault. None of it was. You made the best decision with the information you had."

Wesley looked at her, but addressed Angelus. "I don't understand why she's still alive."

"Always thinking," Angelus said warmly. "That's what I admire about you."

Strangely, that would have been easier to bear if there had been the slightest trace of mockery in his voice.

"The whole point," Angelus said, "is for her to stay alive. I know what she means to you"--ah, there it was now, poison in the honey; it reassured him--"so if she doesn't harm me and mine, she walks free."

Wesley was still failing to understand.

"He said he'd let me say my piece," Fred said, straightening herself as though she were making a presentation. Slender, shy Fred; except there was no hesitancy in the way she met Wesley's eyes or in her bearing. He wondered what her heartbeat revealed.

"Say it, then," Wesley said, not quite facing her. Some things he could not yet bear.

Fred nodded. "All right. Wesley, come back to us. That's all. I--I don't know what game he's playing, keeping you here." She spared no glance for Connor. "He has something he wants. It's time for him to give us something we want."

He was speechless. Then: "You're trading Connor for--me?"

"That wasn't the intent," she said steadily. "We were planning on winning. But everyone else is--I'm what's left of Angel Investigations, so it's for me to say."

It had always been easy for Wesley to forget that Fred, for all that her sanity was shaky, could be more ruthless than any of them. Having lost Connor anyway, she sold him for--"I'm not worth it," he said. "I've accepted my thirty pieces of silver. There's only the halter left for me."

Angelus was still, so still that he drew attention to himself by his lack of motion.

She shook her head, impatient. "We're supposed to be about helping the hopeless, Wesley. There's nothing here for you--"

She said other things, but that was where she lost Wesley. He admired the clarity with which she set out a mission of hope in the mouth of hell, and her willingness to bargain at the devil's door for what small comfort she could. Fundamentally, however, she was loyal to an ideal. He was loyal to a man.

"No," Wesley said softly, because he didn't know how to speak otherwise to Fred. "I can't do it."

"The choice is right in front of you," Fred said. She toyed with a strand of her hair, the first sign of nervousness she had shown. "It's not a matter of forgiving you, Wesley. We know what he does to people, turns day to night and left to right. There's nothing to forgive, and we need you."

"Take her back," Wesley said to Angelus. "I'm not interested in hearing any more of this."

Angelus raised his eyebrows. "Really."

Wesley's resolve had seen him through enough tortures and murders that he had lost count of them; if someone dug through his soul for an accounting of lives they would find nothing but night unrelieved by stars or moon. "Please," he said, averting his eyes from Fred.

Angelus walked over and ran a thumb along Wesley's jaw. "Convince me."

He thought he knew what that meant, reached for the razor blade he kept in his pocket. The scars along his wrists wrote out an alphabet of corrosion; even the oldest ones burned. But no: Angelus leaned in to kiss him, an intimacy he had never required of Wesley before, and one that Wesley had never dared to beg for, either.

There was still time to go back to Fred, to the woman he loved, to rewrite himself in her eyes. To use what he had so callously learned about Angelus's habits and use it against him. To redeem himself.

Wesley returned the kiss, reaching up to drag the other man's head closer. Angelus's mouth tasted faintly of orange juice.

When Wesley stepped back, heart pounding, Fred was still watching them. There wasn't even pity in her eyes. She knew what it was to live as a shattering thing. The difference was, she was strong enough to piece herself together and stand back up. "Go," Wesley said, no longer caring about his shame, her cool regard.

She went without a word even to Connor. He fancied he heard her footsteps all the way down the stairs and back into the night, and beyond that into a light where he could not follow.

"I didn't have to break you," Angelus said, silken. "You did it to yourself."

"Yes," Wesley said. "And I would do it again."

Angelus kissed him again, precise rather than delicate, next slow step in torturing Connor. Wesley bit back a reflexive cry and closed his eyes. So this was the breakfast Angelus had been anticipating.

When Wesley was spent and sprawled on the floor, he in his turn watched Angelus kissing his son lingeringly, and knew what would happen next--if not this night, then the next, or the next after that.


End file.
